Class

I love my students. I love teaching adults. Even with all the pressures of their lives, juggling kids and spouses and jobs and trying to get degrees, they still show up and they still try and they still understand why they’re there. 

And last night they did a great job. As I said I was going to, I had them research Joe Pizarchik on Google. The ensuing discussion gave me the opportunity to explain the difference between bloggers and journalists and how fuzzy a line that has become.  Fortunately for them, their careers are based in science and they completely grasp the concept of fact (vs. opinion). It’s all part of what’s called critical thinking.

 

In memoriam

This piece, an obituary for a real journalist, caught my attention this morning. He was doing it right. I hate to think his kind are getting more rare . . . People need access to the truth, not just regurgitated rumors and allegations.

 

October 22, 2009

Yeah, there’s a parallel . . . A lot of people have written about the decline of journalism, myself included. The link is another person’s viewpoint on the subject.

So when someone in the media (mainstream or otherwise) says, “I’m just telling you what someone else is saying…” without making any effort to find out if it is true, then it’s pretty much the same as saying it directly. This from Wikipedia: 

Lying by omission

One lies by omission by omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. An example is when the seller of a car declares it has been serviced regularly but does not tell that a fault was reported at the last service. Propaganda is an example of lying by omission.

 

Week-end

I read this in Gawker today (it was written about a different topic, but it fits):
“In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about ‘the truth.’”

Yeah, the truth. That’s a good one. A hold has been put on Joe Pizarchik’s nomination. This means that someone is believing the lies written about Joe that have saturated the Internet (so half of them were powered by Coal!).

Tell me when a real reporter is going to do a real story on Joe Pizarchik—a story that reports more than just the lies found with Google.

 

I know, I know

I said I wasn’t going to write anything more about Joe Pizarchik, but I thought I wouldn’t have to. He was voted out of committee last week but the full Senate vote has not yet happened. And then yesterday I received a really funny email from someone and I feel compelled to respond.

To catch up any first-time readers: Joe Pizarchik was nominated to be the director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. Opposition to that nomination started even before he was nominated (I don’t know how that happens, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised). These people have said Joe is unethical and environmentally irresponsible—and that’s the short version. I don’t mind people saying they disagree with his decisions, but I cannot be silent when someone says he’s unethical. And so I began responding.

Some will say I have a bias. Of course I do. And it would take about a minute on the Internet to find out what that bias is. Does that make me less credible? If you think so, your mind was already made up before you read my blog. But unlike those people making horrible accusations, I’ve supported my comments with documentation from official sources (see my Freshman comp, lessons 1-3, in this blog for a definition of good sources). My words would stand up in court. The opposition knows theirs wouldn’t.

Which brings me back to that funny email that prompted this entry. That email challenged me to provide specific sources in support of Joe Pizarchik. That is the job of a reporter, as I’ve said. In my blog entries of September 25 and 26, I did just that. I quoted government sources on coal ash:

Here are two articles, easily available on PA DEP’s website, responding to two charges by EIP about coal ash. The first one refers to lead pollution, the second to trace metals.

This one is PA DEP’s response to charges from the Clean Air Task Force.

And I’ll provide a new one, which is specifically about TVA coal ash.

And then there are other accomplishments during Joe’s tenure (which, FYI, started in October 2002), including his work on the Flight 93 memorial, his work on the Good Samaritan Act, the reduction in mine-subsidence insurance rates in PA, and his work on securing explosive magazines in PA. Plus a strong endorsement from someone who has worked with Joe. And yet somehow this doesn’t silence the critics.

Speaking of reporters, I do have to give recognition to Daniel Malloy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He’s the only reporter I’ve seen who made an effort to acknowledge the other side of this argument. Granted, I haven’t read every single piece written about Joe’s nomination, but I’ve read a lot. Malloy quoted Senator Bingaman. He also obviously spoke to the Department of the Interior about Joe. In other words, he did his job.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I hope a lot of people read this and click on ALL the links. Read about Joe. Know the truth.

 

Adieu

to this topic at least. It is with great relief that I can say that I won’t be posting anything about Joe Pizarchik’s nomination anymore. I don’ t have to. He’s been voted out of committee (pay close attention to what Chairman Bingaman says in the article). What have I learned from this experience? Plenty.

For starters, the Internet has allowed opinion to morph into “authority,” which is a real shame. Granted, newspapers have always had owners and ideologies and leanings one way or another. But am I naive to think that there was a time newspapers could be trusted to provide the facts? When I was a reporter, I always tried to get both sides of an issue represented (no matter what I thought of the issue). So many times, though, I was frustrated by someone who would say, “You won’t get it right so I’m not talking to you.” Even when I explained that the only way to get their voice heard in the debate was for them to talk to me, they wouldn’t listen. And I’d have to write that “Calls to ___ were unreturned” sentence. I hated that.

I also learned that hearing “it’s not personal,” no matter how many times, doesn’t make it so. This was an extremely painful experience for me. I will never understand some people’s motivations for what they did. I’ve certainly lost some of my willingness to trust.

I also lost my willingness to identify myself carte blanche as a liberal. As I’ve said, I thought these were my people, but my people wouldn’t act the way these folks have. So from now on I’m going to do a lot less mass-judgment (of which we are all guilty, of course) and more research and reflection before forming an opinion. I guess that’s a good thing.

And I’ll be using this experience as part of my freshman comp lessons for a while. I think I’ll ask my students to research Joe Pizarchik and see how many of them get to a real, credible source. I think we call that a teachable moment? Ha!

So it’s back to bears and rock stars and birds and marriage, back to music and movies and my dear mother and my dog. And book reviews, of course. Thanks for reading and hope you continue to!

 

September 22, 2009

I saw an article (Toledo Blade on-line) yesterday quoting President Obama about the state of media today, but I couldn’t figure out how to link just the article, so I didn’t post it. Today I found an article in the Christian Science Monitor about paying for Internet news access and it contains the relevant quotes from the president:

In an interview with the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, President Barack Obama hinted that newspapers should consider charging their readers: “Journalistic integrity, you know, fact-based reporting, serious investigative reporting, how to retain those ethics in all these different new media and how to make sure that it’s paid for, is really a challenge. But it’s something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy. What I hope is that people start understanding if you’re getting your newspaper over the Internet, that’s not free and there’s got to be a way to find a business model that supports that. “

Obama also weighed in on the tone of digital journalism: “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”

The reason I quote this should be obvious to my regular readers. Any news source that takes itself seriously, that chooses to quote what the citizen-activists have claimed about Joe Pizarchik, without (as the president said) “serious fact-checking” is not doing its job. I’m still waiting for a legitimate news source to do just that.